Getting Nowhere with Running

There are certain house rules that go from generally good ideas to absolutely necessary when you exceed a certain number of kids in a single residence. One example of this is not running in the house. It’s almost never a good idea for kids to run inside, but it is always a bad idea for six kids to all be running inside at the same time. 

It seems houses are specifically designed to hurt you if you do choose to run indoors. I mean, there are corners and sharp counters or furniture edges everywhere. I think children see this as a challenge. 

I semi-joked that the older two boys may have developed a sort of bat-like accident avoidance system by spending the first few years of their lives in our small first house regularly running down the narrow hallway. They became experts at zipping past each other like Blue Angel fighter pilots at an air show. 

Our current house doesn’t have a narrow hallway, but the extra wide and long hall has made for a veritable runway. And the boys are constantly taking off from one end of the house to the other. 

My wife and I are like air traffic controllers walking through this space. “Spitfire #6 you do NOT have clearance to land, I repeat you do NOT have clearance!” 

In aviation when planes get within so many feet of each other the event is recorded as a near miss. At our hallway airfield we would have a similar category in our record keeping for incidents called “near hits.” I say we would have this, however our logs are so full of actual hits there’s no room to record the almost hits. 

A lot of these situations equate to bumps, but there have been a handful of full-on collisions. We recently had one where our 7-year-old equivalent of an Airbus collided with our 3-year-old equivalent of a commuter jet and sent him flying (pun intended). 

I was in the air traffic control tower (aka standing nearby) and had picked up the fast moving inbound 7-year-old about a second before the collision. I couldn’t get out, “Airbus 777 you are NOT cleared for takeoff,” so all I shouted was, “whoa whoa whoa!” But the third whoa wasn’t even completely out before the 3-year-old came tearing around the corner and got plowed over.  

It didn’t take an FAA investigation to determine what had occurred. 

Maybe I need to get a pair of those orange runway signaling devices and post up in the hallway to monitor and provide traffic control. Those guys always look like they’re having fun directing airliners or fighter jets on aircraft carriers. 

The problem is, if I did this, the boys would be so interested in the signaling device (it does kind of look like a Jedi lightsaber) they’d all come running at the same to look at it. Which would defeat the whole purpose and add a level of irony to the collision that wouldn’t be appreciated. 

So I guess I’ll have to come up with something else. Maybe speed bumps?